stuff i learned from other people

Good evening y'all,

It is Sunday evening, July 25, 2010. We are officially 18 days and 17 hours from the wedding. I could not be more ready. There is a lot left to do but it will happen whether we're ready. Honestly, I can say no cold feet and little nervousness. I'm mostly just excited and ready to be relaxing with my new wife in Mexico. The wedding is fun and all, but I think I'm most looking forward to married life-getting back to St. Paul and settling into life together.

There are three weeks of CPE left. I've loved it, but I'm definitely ready to be back to life as normal. The clinical time with patients has been my favorite. Don't get me wrong, the group time and on call has been fine-but the best part is really existing with people as they travel through some life changing times.

Last week we had our "CPE day" with the other advocate health centers. This was definitely one of the academic highlights of the summer. The keynote speaker was the Rev. Dr. Teresa Snorton. She is the director of the national ACPE and bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal church. Dr. Snorton spoke beautifully to us about diversity in ministry. During her presentation, I had the opportunity to share my theological traditions with the people at my table. At this, I realized that I owe a lot to denominations other than the ELCA that have had an affect on my worldview. Specifically, I have learned a lot from the anabaptist peace churches and the UUs. There are others that have influenced me, but these are a couple that I have not previously acknowledged. From the first, I have grown into an ethic of nonviolence. From the second I have learned quite a bit.

I attended a UU community for a while in college and was attracted to it for a number of reasons. First, the UUs are held together not necessarily by doctrine or dogma, but by practice and appreciation for the dignity of all peoples. Similarly, I do not believe that we are ultimately judged by intellectual assent to doctrine. Intellectual assent does not ultimately define our stance before our graceful, loving God. Christianity is about more than assent. It is about community and practice. If I were ultimately judged by whether I believed everything perfectly, I would certainly be damned. Second, the UUs have a profound respect for other religions. Third, I experienced radical hospitality from UUs. I felt accepted wholly, simply for who I was. This is the kind of church God desires. Well, you might ask what brought me back to the ELCA? Sin. What I first appreciate about Lutheranism is the reality with which it understands humanity. There is something deeply wrong about humanity. Something that needs redeemed. Lutheranism points to and even emphasizes this. During lent, the congregations confront this communally. In our culture of excess, it is so important to admit that we are broken and sinful, that we participate daily in systems of sin and that there is no way to shake this sin without the help of God. This is the language my spirit speaks.

dawning activism.

Some updates on the happenings here at Luther: Part of my involvement in student council here is to commit to forming and being active in a committee. The committee are essentially campus groups engaged in specific work aimed at benefiting the campus and the community. So a few of us students decided to start the Community Connection Team, committed to service and justice in the Twin Cities. There is a really great core of people involved and we already have drawn up plans for campus wide engagement in issues of poverty. We are coordinating a "mitten tree" with Lutheran Social Services. So, if you are reading this and you are in the area, please stop by and pick up a couple requests for items to donate to LSS! My hope for this group is that we become more and more deeply involved in working against poverty. You know, perhaps the most disappointing thing for me in coming to seminary was what I perceived to be a lack of concern for social justice. There is a rich tradition of justice in Lutheranism (see Bonhoeffer) but I fear that we grace ourselves into complacency and acceptance of our roles in oppressive systems. Grace is important but we must remember that we are freed to be slaves to each other (see Luther's Freedom of a Christian and the uses of the Law). Great, we are saved by grace through faith, now what. Do we only believe because we get to go to heaven or are we captivated by the invitation to live differently than the world, to say no to oppression and fear and certainty and yes to justice and love and faith. The central question here is one that I struggle with on a daily basis: Why Christian? So I am very excited about this new development on campus.

Outside of this, the semester is winding down and that means work. Glorious, glorious work. Fortunately, my job at the phonathon is going to end next week, just in time to focus on the finals. Woo!

wow-long time, short post

Good night.

I have not written in a very long time. I apologize for this and will try once again to make it at least a weekly thing. It has been crazy busy with midterms the past couple weeks and it looks like it will only get crazier in the near future. Oh well, I guess that is what I signed up for. I suppose the horrendous busyness is a good way to teach me to say no to things. For me this is a hard learned lesson, but one I am learning and that I know I will be thankful for in the long run. This is an opportunity to learn what self-care looks like in the midst of chaos. You know, it is kind of silly but the ELCA has this spiritual wholeness wheel that I have been trying to live by the past week or so. Last week was my synod's candidacy retreat and we spent a good deal of time talking about the wheel which has six parts: Physical, social, emotional, intellectual, vocational, and financial. Running through all of these is spiritual wellbeing. Now, I normally think stuff like this is ridiculous, but after just a few weeks of seminary, it is clear that so many church folk need to learn to better care for themselves.

I tell you that to tell you this: today was my first day at my teaching parish. This is a program where seminarians become a part of a single church body in the area. My context is a mission congregation called Jacob's Well. I feel like this is going to be a great fit and it will certainly get me started on my focus on mission and emerging ministries. Today's message was about economic justice and freedom (obviously, being Reformation day, this is not a "regular" Lutheran church). It really made me question my relationship with money which is something that I think about a lot. The question always bothers me: is it ok to still have plenty of money and just give, save, and spend it well or are we called to poverty? This is probably the question I struggle with the most. Jacob's Well today made one of the first decent cases I have ever heard for the first option of stewardship. You can check out their website for more info on the link above. Also, when you get a chance, look at this site. Talk to you soon.

Tim

pleasantly heretical

Good evening. I am just coming from what may have been the most fruitful conversation that I have had here thus far. It came in the most surprising place-from a class that I normally don't put a lot into or get a lot out of. The ruach blows where it pleases. Let me explain.

I haven't been completely honest in my conversations with many of you and in my blog. Seminary, in some ways has been quite a difficult adjustment. I think this explains how I have often felt here: creep. I have felt so out of place in many ways. Like a heretic. I get the whole Lutheran thing and I am more than happy to call myself a Lutheran because of the firm foundation in theology of the cross-what I think to be the most positive theological move that the church has ever made. My big problem has to do with what the church is teaching. In our affluent context, I don't think we need to have such an enormous emphasis on anselmic atonement theory. Great, we're going to heave. Now what? I get it, saved by grace through faith, but I am starting to see that, especially if the Kingdom of God, Jesus central message in the gospels, is to be even a partial reality, then it is time to focus our efforts on community and discipleship. Our churches need to be challenged to listen to what Jesus says in the gospels, and take Him seriously. We are so happy to hear about how we've been saved for heaven, but we are so offended when we are asked to widen our community or work for the hope of the proclamation that salvation is a present reality.

This may be disjointed, but in short, have been drowning in a sea of this orthodoxy here, finding few other friendly heretics with whom I can huddle. Fortunately, no, by the grace of God, I stuck around in my Ed 1 class after we were free to go watch the holy game tonight. The few of us who stuck around talked. I was given a glimmer of grace.

Our conversation boiled down to forming church around perichoretic relationships. This p word is a fancy and very useful way of talking about the Trinity. Mutual indwelling is the fancy term to describe the fancy p word and what that means is that all the parts of the Trinity are interconnected but have sure borders as well. As Tertullian put it, "three persons, one substance." I won't go much further, but I really encourage you to read about it. Moltmann writes extensively on the subject. In any matter, this image of the trinity affects our communities as we seek to form those in the image of the perichoretic trinity. Our communities are called to be places of mutual indwelling and respectful "interpenetration." (snicker at this point.) To put it in the easiest terms possible I will use Peter Rollins' paradigm shift. The old way that church was "done" was modeled in a "Believe-then behave-then belong" paradigm. In this, orthodoxy was key. We formed groups because we believed the same stuff. In this way, salvation is understood as an end event in which we go to heaven for believing the right things (sounds like works righteousness to me.) The shift is being made to "Belong-then Behave-then Believe." Like children born into a family, we first belong to each other and to God. Then this affects our ethics. Finally, we may agree on some points. From this point, we can respectfully disagree and know that none of us know. This may have been a rambling discourse, but it is all I can offer right now. Good night and good luck.

the business of the church

Let me begin by explaining that we M Div first years (juniors) have the "extra curricular" assignment for which we find a "teaching congregation" at which we work 10-12 hours every month. I am really quite excited for this project as it is a great way to understand better the life of the parish and a chance to directly move from the ideas discussed in the classroom into the practice of those ideas in the parish. Still, I am a little irked by the way in which the assignment is to be carried out. And my discomfort has to do with the wider practices of the faithful in our American context.

Here is a journal entry for my education course from earlier today:

This revamped form of the teaching parish is, for me, still in the "church shopping" phase. I visit new churches every week as a sojourner to find one that fits. I am torn over whether this is a good method. While we do need o be in congregations that fit and challenge us, a part of me is very uncomfortable with church shopping. It seems ideal to me to have a community parish where one's whole community meets to worship and live life together. But I understand (especially after reading God is Back) that this has never really been a part of our nation's ecclesial landscape. Voluntarism is a part of our faith. I am also made uncomfortable by the language that is directly taken from capitalism. This model is so marketing and business like. It smacks of competition. We must sell our message to the public and the group with the best sales pitch, and who presents the shiniest version of the product gets the customers. The reality of our context is that this tends to be true. Even the emerging church, which I tend to hold up, presents the gospel in a way that is designed to be attractive, ready to consume, and, dare I say, trendy. New monastics-those so ardently opposed to consumer culture-even market their message (see the sales numbers of Claiborne's books).

Now, I wonder, is this a part of the nature of religion, which needs people in order to survive? Or, as a people so shaped by the Wealth of Nations, is this an especially American or post/late-modern phenomenon? Can evangelism be done without the use of micro-economic language that makes the capitalist model its normative framework?